Antarctic Extremes

Antarctica is extremely extreme. Everybody knows it’s cold, but not only is it really cold, it’s also very dry, very high, very empty, very far from everything else…

Dry: obviously, very little rain falls in Antarctica, though the peninsula – the most temperate part of the continent – does see significant liquid precipitation: about 20 inches (500 millimeters) a year. Other coastal regions get about 8 inches (200mm) a year. Everywhere else on the continent, all the water falls as snow, and then only in tiny quantities that total about 2 inches (50mm) a year. The amazingly named “McMurdo Dry Valleys,” though, have a whole ‘nother thing going on:

In fact, scientists believe that in some parts of the Dry Valleys it hasn’t snowed or rained for 14 million years!

Source.

High: The average elevation across the continent is 1.5 miles (2,500 meters). The South Pole is a bit higher, at 1.8 miles (2,830m), and the highest spot on the continent, the Vinson Massif, is almost exactly three miles high (4,892m) – about half the height of Qomolungma/Sagarmatha/Everest, and the fifth highest of the Seven Summits.

Empty: Yeah, there’s not much there except snow and ice. No permanent human inhabitants, for starters. No terrestrial animals – no mammals, no reptiles, no amphibians. Just a few plants, all low to the ground, slow growing, and native to the few spots of open land near the coasts.

On the other wing, the continent has lots of birds, at least along the coastline, and of course lots and lots of ocean life, from fish and krill to marine mammals, including the elephant seal, which is the largest carnivoran! (This, I don’t quite understand yet: orcas are larger, but they’re not “carnivorans.”)

Cold: Even the Antarctica Peninsula, the warmest part of the continent, doesn’t get very warm. During “austral summer,” temperatures on the peninsula can rise to around 40º F (4º C), but are often below freezing, and can drop to 10º F (-12º C). The South Pole is way colder all the time:

The average annual temperature is -49 °C (-56 °F), ranging from about -28 °C (-18 °F) in January to about -59.5 °C (-74.5 °F) in July. The lowest recorded temperature is -83 °C (-117 °F), while the highest is -12 °C (10 °F).

Source.

And yes, -117º F is pretty damn cold, but not the coldest! The continental and world record for cold was recorded in 1983 at the Soviet Union’s Vostok station, about 800 miles from the South Pole. In July 1983, the poor bastards there recorded a low temperature of -128.6 °F (-89.2 °C). The highest temperature ever recorded at Vostok 7º F (-14 °C). Be glad you’re not the guy who has to check that thermometer.

Vostok Station (via Wikipedia)

Werner Herzog at the Bottom of the World

A fun part of my prep for the Antarctica trip is watching documentaries on Antarctica. They’re naturally focused on penguins *() and the South Pole, but the German auteur-weirdo Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (2007) was refreshingly different – though if you have watched any Herzog docs, you know he’s going to focus on the fellow-weirdos he meets. Spoiler alert: there are a lot of weirdos in Antarctica!

Over the film’s 99 minutes, Herzog performs an artful bait-and-switch that’s worth the price of the rental. The movie starts by dwelling at length on the ugliness of the American base on McMurdo Sound (he compares it to a mining camp) and the nuttiness of the people who work there – folks who could be working at a small-town gas station. There’s the survival trainer who puts his students’ heads in white utility buckets, leashes them together, and then has them try to find their way around an open snowfield. They can’t. They’d all die in a whiteout blizzard. Less terrifyingly, Herzog talks with a heavy-equipment driver who says with undergraduate profundity, “The universe dreams through our dreams. And I think that there are many different ways for reality to bring itself forward, and dreaming is definitely one of those ways.”

After his stay at McMurdo, Herzog gradually goes further and further into the wilderness of Antarctica – true wilderness, devoid of any humans but scientists. He journeys to the lip of perpetually-erupting Mt. Erebus – named for one of the ships sailed to Antarctica in 1839-1843 by the eminent 19th century explorer James Clark Ross – to talk with the volcanologists there. One helpfully offers tips for surviving a rain of lava from the lake below, where the earth’s crust is torn open. (Don’t turn your away from the lava lake: back away it, don’t run from it, so you can see the lava bombs sailing toward you and duck, or maybe contemplate your obliteration.)

Later – or maybe earlier; it’s hard to tell since the film has no real narrative direction – Herzog visits a team of biologists camped on an ice shelf to study the seals that swim, invisible but audible, under them. Some of the researchers gently ambush female seals by covering their heads with a bag and then milk them to analyze their milk – thick like latex paint, amazingly devoid of lactose – and understand how they can possibly perpetuate their species in a place like this. One of the seal-ologists says, almost sheepishly, that the place is so quiet she can hear her heartbeat. Then Herzog films them splaying themselves out on the ice to listen not to their own heartbeats, but to the seals’ otherworldly submarine songs.

That is the sort of arresting image that Herzog loves, and that fills this beautiful film – not empty whitescapes, but nearly empty ones where a trio of researchers crouch on the ice, geologists perch on the rim of a volcano, or a tiny vehicle zooms over the white vacuum , or a diver, taking his last plunge, swims along the sea bed, taking video of the bizarre animals that – unlike the humans – are perfectly at home in this harsh, beautiful place.

A continent with no countries

One of the most interesting aspects of Antarctica as a place is that, unlike pretty much every square foot of every other continent, Antarctica does not belong to any country. In a very real sense, Antarctica belongs to the international community.

This is due mostly, or at least legally, to the Antarctic Treaty, which was signed by an initial dozen countries on December 1, 1959, and which has been steadily expanded and improved since then. Right now, 52 countries have acceded to the treaty.

In preparing for my trip to Antarctica, I’ve enjoyed reading about the treaty, its history, and its present effects. One aspect of the treaty that I find surprising and inspiring is its grounding in the International Geophysical Year of 1958-1959, a massive effort to broaden the base of scientific knowledge about the planet – everything from magnetism and gravity to oceanography and meteorology. The IGY was not wholly exempt from Cold War tensions. For instance, the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. both launched their first space satellites during its span, and the U.S. founded NASA to manage its part of the Space Race.

Despite or even because of the competition between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., the IGY did dramatically improve what humanity knew about Antarctica, and create infrastructure for future science, from surveys and exploration to the establishment of several new scientific stations. While this could well have led to the renewal of national claims to Antarctic territory, instead the international community went in the polar (ha!) opposite direction – toward making Antarctica a neutral place. The Antarctic Treaty, signed two years later, legally set the entire continent and its waters outside the nation-state system.

Diplomatic Conference on the Antarctic Treaty (1959)

Representatives of the initial twelve counties, and of 40 more since 1961, signed because they

Recognized that it is in the interest of all mankind that Antarctica shall continue forever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes and shall not become the scene or object of international discord

[and were]

Convinced also that a treaty ensuring the use of Antarctica for peaceful purposes only and the continuance of international harmony in Antarctica will further the purposes and principles embodied in the Charter of the United Nations.

Fourteen short articles outlined specifics such as banning nuclear weapons and military maneuvers and endorsing scientific cooperation – and how to maintain and expand the treaty permanently.

I find all those pretty inspiring on its own and as a sign that humans can sometimes make good collective choices. Against the backdrop of current efforts – so far, woefully lacking – to combat climate change, the treaty’s longevity and real power seem even more important. We – humans, organizations, countries – can work together to slow or halt climate change, or any of the zillion other international problems with which we’ve plagued ourselves (including, of course, the present plague).

Maybe. Sometimes? I hope.

Corona Art

I was surprised to see art on the walls of the small exhibit space in the art building! Turns out, it’s last year’s junior art students’ show – work they couldn’t exhibit last spring because the world melted down. Beyond its excellent name, the show includes lots of great drawings, among other wonderful stuff. If this is any indication of this cohort’s skill, their senior show in the spring should be great!

Pandemic! in the Men’s Room

The old building where I’ve worked my whole time at Carleton is being renovated this year, so we’ve relocated to slightly less old building that boasts all of two restrooms. I dunno about the women’s, but the men’s has two stalls – done up in heavy, dark wood like a lavatory at Hogwarts – which under the new pandemic rules, has the capacity for just one, uh, user at a time. Barging in and knocking didn’t work very well to determine occupancy, so a colleague installed a four-phase system for using the restroom.

Phase I: Arrive and flip the occupancy sign to red:

Phase 2: Do your business and as you leave, let Uncle Sam remind you to flip the sign over:

Phase 3: Immediately forget to flip the sign over, but be reminded by the other sign, pinned to the bulletin board straight across the corridor:

Phase 4: Flip the sign back to green and walk away, wondering if touching the sign negated the 20 seconds of hand washing:

Jim Harrison and Yooper Literature

I’d never read anything by Jim Harrison until he died a few years ago and my Yooper news alert drew my attention to this amazing essay in the New York Times on his love of the U.P. Till I read that piece – which describes some of Harrison’s favorite places in da Yoop, including my beloved Copper Country – I don’t think I’d ever read much serious, non-historical writing (however brief) about the Upper Peninsula, and I remember being impressed and touched that a real writer like Jim Harrison – who wrote the novella Legends of the Fall and then the screenplay for the movie starring Brad Pitt! – had loved the place.

That Times essay was occasioned by the release of a compilation of five novellas by Harrison about an Everyman named Brown Dog, who’s a sort of woodsman with few needs, fewer goals, and a habit, if not quite a penchant, for adventure. He’s a very U.P. character. Though I didn’t know any one person exactly like B.D., I knew a lot of people who were a lot like him: satisfied being underemployed but happy to cut pulp and fix cars, lovers of fishing and hunting and the outdoors, given to a little more drinking than might be healthy, not too interested in leaving the region…

Even more than Brown Dog himself, I loved Harrison’s evocation of the U.P. as a place. Early in the collection, Brown Dog says that 49º is the perfect temperature (and that 49 mph is the perfect speed). I agree! 49º means spring or fall, means wearing the same clothes indoors and out with no need to put on or take off a jacket, means new life arriving or old life leaving, means proximity to snow if not quite snow itself.

B.D. also loves the second-growth forests and the little creeks that run inevitably to the big lakes, and especially the swamps. The U.P. – like northern Wisconsin and Minnesota, two places I love, and apparently like Finland, a place I love even though I’ve never visited – is a land of swamps.

If anything, too little of the Brown Dog novellas are set in the snowy winters that sets da Yoop apart from even the northern end of the Lower Peninsula, or the western tip of Lake Superior. The seasons deeply affect Brown Dog’s life (he can’t wait for the trout opener), for sure, but he never really lives through a bad good winter. Maybe that’s because Harrison and Brown Dog knew the eastern and south-central parts of the U.P. better than the northwestern parts. But Harrison and Brown Dog did appreciate, with a good healthy sense of U.P. humor, what snow means up dere:

I happened to finish the novellas – which ramble picaresquely over a decade of Brown Dog’s life – just as the Copper Country suffered massive flooding that laid waste to roads, hillsides, businesses, houses. The disaster was probably the biggest in the Copper Country’s history, with $100 million in damage (but thankfully just one death). I like to imagine Brown Dog would have driven his shitty car over from Escanaba to Houghton to help out with the cleanup, maybe asking for no more payment than a couple six packs.

Rediscovering Minnesota before the United States

When I was a kid growing up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I was fascinated by the fact that the U.P. had not always been part of the United States, much less part of Michigan. Visiting the reconstructed Fort Michimilimackinac at the northern tip of the Lower Peninsula and Fort Mackinac on Mackinac Island in the channel between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, I loved learning that this territory had been France, Britain, and Canada before it was the United States — and though nobody really dwelt on it, that the land had belonged to the Ottawa and Ojibwa before any white men showed up.

As I grew up, my interest in the U.P.’s history shifted from the 18th and early 19th centuries to the region’s industrial golden age between roughly the Civil War and World War II, when the U.P. furnished the copper and iron that the burgeoning American economy needed, and when the area’s population was as large, diverse, and affluent as it had ever been or would ever be. In those years, I lived first in Ironwood at the far western tip of the U.P., a town that had been the biggest city in the Gogebic Iron Range, and later in Hancock at the southern end of the glorious Keweenaw Peninsula, in the heart of the Copper Country. Both Ironwood and Hancock were hollowed-out, depressed, and depressing towns that had lost half or more of their boom-time populations by the time I lived there.

That direct experience of living in busted towns colored by outlook on life, for sure, but also impelled me to study — in college and in grad school — how any why American capitalism works this way, in cycles of brief, amazing nooms that create something out of nothing, and the long, sad busts that see the something fade back almost to nothing. In pursuing those questions by focusing on World War II , my former interests in the political and social history of the the 17th/18th centuries all but faded away.

Since moving back to Minnesota, and especially since moving to Northfield, where the annual commemoration of the defeat of Jesse James’ raiding gang is literally a town holiday, I have started rediscovering these older interests, though: the efforts by whites from Lewis & Clark to Zebulon Pike to tie the Old Northwest into the new republic at the beginning of the 19th century, the subsequent “settlement” of Minnesota by whites in the middle of that century, the conversion of pre-contact forests and prairies to farmland, the Dakota Wars that coincided with the Civil War…

These revived interests matched perfectly with a new book by historian Theodore Catton, Rainy Lake House: Twilight of Empire on the Northern Frontier, which tells the amazing and sad story of white colonization of the lands between the western end of Lake Superior and the Red River Valley – what’s now the U.P., Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ontario, and Manitoba. (My friend Michael Allen – a professor of history at Northwestern University – sent me the book, thinking correctly that I’d love it.)

Much of the story was generally familiar, from the ways that France, Britain, and the new U.S. drew Indians into the fur trade and then into land swindles to the competition among those three countries – empires – over the Old Northwest and the peoples in them: the Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Lakota nations; traders, settlers, and soldiers from each country; the mixed métis of Canada.

Some of the story was less familiar to me, such as the incredibly difficult, lucrative, and destructive fur industry; the efforts through the middle of the 19th c. to launch new colonies in Canada; and the out-of-placeness of the métis who were neither French-Canadian nor Indian. And some of the story was wholly new, such as the bizarre forms of society on the frontier (many white traders had two families: a white family back east in Montreal or Toronto and an Indian wife and family in some fort or factory deep in the interior) or the sad life of John Tanner, a white man who’d been kidnapped by Indians as a child and grew up as a sort of white Indian but who was not accepted either as an American or as an Indian.

Tanner’s story is the core of Rainy Lake House, and Catton tells the story well, using Tanner’s upbringing in Ojibwa culture and maturation as a skilled hunter and trapper to show how the Indian nations adapted – or failed to adapt – to the expansion of the British in the north and the Americans to the south. Tanner was an enigma to almost everyone who met him, not least to the wife who tried to murder him. Tanner’s near-mortal injury led to his meeting the curmudgeonly, frustrated Canadian doctor and fur trader John McLoughlin and the ambitious American army officer and explorer Stephen Long. Working on opposite sides of the grand game to control the fur territories, McLoughlin and Long reflected, enacted, and created the economic, political, and cultural views on the exploitation and settlement of what was then and is still now a remote and thinly settled region.

As much as I enjoyed Catton’s skillful triple biography of these three men, I enjoyed even more his subtle sketching of the places where they lived, places I know a little bit now through my winter bike riding – the forests and swamps between Ely and International Falls, Minnesota or the plains along the Red River south of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Leaving aside the ultimately sad, if riveting, narratives about the various ways that Tanner, McLoughlin, and Long contributed to “settling” the Old Northwest, I was fascinated by the simple fact that any travel in this area required insanely arduous travel by foot or canoe. A few miles of fatbiking in January in northern Minnesota pales in comparison to the seasonal treks of the voyeageurs between what’s now far-northeastern Minnesota and Montreal, or the endless roving by the Ojibwa and Ottawa across their homelands.

I highly recommend Rainy Lake House to anyone interested in the history of Minnesota or the Upper Midwest, in the history of the early American Republic, or in the history of American Indians. The book reads like a much shorter work than its heft suggests, and any reader will come away with a new appreciation for the complexities of the 19th c. frontier, a place that was both a deeply multicultural society (though not an egalitarian one) and an ecosystem transformed by political, economic, and cultural pressures.

College Spring

This picture, man. It captures so many aspects Carleton. First, the greens and blues of the trees, grasses, water, and sky! It’s easy to forget the unusual gorgeousness of campus – true in all seasons but especially pronounced in the spring.

Second, there’s the island in the middle of the scene: Mai Fête Island, site of dance parties and general merriment in the 1920s and 1930s. Now it’s a quiet picnic spot, occupied in this shot by two of the geese that take over the Lyman Lakes (really just a wide spot in Spring Creek as it flows toward the Cannon River) and some gorgeously mature trees. Plus naturally one of the college’s three-bin trash/recycling/compost containers. 

In the distance, the Recreation Center and, beyond it, the highest spot on campus, the college’s shiny water tower, with its bright blue C on each side. The trees of the Arboretum run north and east from those two landmarks. More green, and onmy maybe a third of the  way to the plush verdance they’ll display in a few months. 

In the foreground, the east-reaching branches of the gnarled old oak that clings to the hillside above the lakes, a newish paved path intended to keep students from using the shoulder of the highway to walk from campus proper to the Rec, and a disc golf goal. I don’t think I’ve seen more than ten people playing disc golf there in my ten years of waking the route. 

Just out of the left side of the frame is a functional tin-can telephone. Some student installed it a couple weeks ago, bolting one terminal to a fence along the sidewalk running next to the oak. You can just baaaaaaarely see the yellow line running over the water just above the lowest oak branch down to a post on Mai Fête. So bizarre and so Carleton. I have to find the time and a partner to try it out.  

Companionship in extremis

(Warning: contains confession of possible craziness.)

In a short essay on the Adventure Journal website, Erin Windauer describes the occasional but not rare sense of athletes, adventurers, and others that they are in the presence of someone or something which is benevolent or reassuring but which isn’t actually *there*.

Ernest Shackleton’s epic tale of survival after the sinking of his ship the Endurance in Antarctic waters is well known, but less known is what he and two of his companions experienced after they made their way by open boat, above, to South Georgia Island and trekked across to a whaling station to find salvation. Each of the three felt the presence of someone with them: “During that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia,” wrote Shackleton in his memoir, “it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.”

Though I don’t quite see the link between this sensation and the lab experiments summarized in Windauer’s piece, I can’t stop thinking about the phenomenon, which is one I’ve experienced in some of my winter races.

I didn’t even know that my feeling of being… joined? guided? accompanied? was a thing; I just chalked it up to being hungry, cold, and exhausted. And yes, all those stressors might have contributed to my sense that *something* was with me while I rode and walked off Two Top on January 8, thirty-six hours into the Fat Pursuit.  

But still: to have that experience in common with Shackleton is strangely satisfying.